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sábado, 4 de fevereiro de 2012

I really haven't heard about this guy! He died to soon to be known: 1937-1967. Left some unfinished notwithstanding marvellous pictures, of naked or half-naked women, for us all to see. He auto crashed himself, too drunk, too soon. A book was published two years after his death, just for the record. Ten years later, in 2009, the world finally had the opportunity to see a retrospective of his wonderful work, at FOAM, in Amsterdam, and at Laurence Miller Gallery, in New York. Pop art is unfinished business so far.

Not many words from him have been recorded, or printed. Let's then keep the few that have been rescued from oblivious...

There are many men who’ll never see a woman in ecstasy. They change from one thing to something else completely different. Human emotions are my subject matter. I photograph people. They’re what interest me, obsess me. I want to know what pushes them to do what they do. I don’t look for them in the street; I don’t do random photography. I direct them and record the moment they open up and become naked. I chose the most emotionally charged moments, the point of no return. I’m fanatically zealous!— Sanne Sannes.

Curiosity has some built-in pornographic pulsion, or a -scopic attraction if we mean the visual world alone, and is sexual in nature. This is standard knowledge since Sigmund Freud, and more from Edward Bernay's Propaganda (1928) onwards. Photography was of great help to make this otherwise difficult technique, I mean painting, an everyday gesture. A hundred years were enough to each of us to fantasize in almost perfect ready-made pictures our near world. The technique came from Niépce, Fox Talbot and Nadar, but the narrative as well as the new naked moral have been established by Manet, Courbet, and other painters alike.Pop art is nothing but a urban crossroad of new media and older narratives. Think about Diderot, Sade and Masoch. Think about D. H Lawrence, and think about the nineteenth-century realist writers George Eliot and Balzac, remember the early twenty-century D. H. Lawrence. The embarrassment about photography though comes from its somehow frightening realism, as the French Roland Barthes put it in Camera Lucida (1980), here summarized by Jenifer Schadlick:

The "thing" Barthes hopes to arrive at is alternately called photography's eidos or noeme; it is what essentially differentiates Photography from other images. The "community" of images Barthes attempts to distinguish Photography from includes Film, or Cinema, and Painting. Barthes' first taxonomic challenge lies in the contingency of the photograph; "it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency…the This…in short, what Lacan calls…the Real, in its indefatigable expression." The photograph essentially says, "Look. Here it is." However, it points to and repeats something that "has been" and "could never be repeated existentially." Barthes connects this eternal present tense of the photograph to the impossibility of separating a photograph from its referent. The apparent difficulty this causes Barthes ultimately serves him in his purpose; he says, "I didn't yet know that this stubbornness of the referent in always being there would produce the essence I was looking for."— in Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida—Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) / annotation by Jenifer Schadlick (Theories of Media, Winter 2004).

Sanne Sannes — Untitled, 1962-65

Beauty, beauty! Even in misery, violence and crime, even in the midst of the big horror of near death, we worship for a bit of beauty, for a bit of mercy —a moment of silence, please!An instant of time to see and to listen to that big universe we all belong to, innocent creatures, dying victims, and demons. The curiosity about transformation, that joke of all life forms, overcoming any fake sureness. The shape of time is the shape of a woman, the body of life has the form of a vulva! Shocking —of course!